Tante Chouchotte said America was too far to see: what Polly was staring at so hard that she was going to ruin her eyes was not land. That strip of blue at the edge of the long gray ocean was only more water.
Tante Chouchotte didnât like Americans. Pollyâs mother had married oneâa cellist, of all things!âand left the family forever. Pollyâs mother came back for the summers, but she spent the whole time in Paris, scattering her children around with friends and relatives in the countryside: the older ones, Evie and Louise and Pete Junior, to Marie-Claireâs, in the Alps; Polly to the beach with the little cousins.
Polly was a pillâune piluleâgloomy and solemn and given to crying over nothing at all. Her siblings had gone to the countryside for the summer as soon as they could speakâTante Chouchotte herself had taken care of them when they were babiesâand their French was perfect, but Polly was five and this was her first summer with Chouchotte. Last summer she had still gone everywhere with her mother. Imagine! A four-year-old traipsing around to the kinds of cafĂ©s and bars GeneviĂšve was known to frequent. GeneviĂšve knew nothing of the work of disciplining children. Sheâd had a charmed life, Tante Chouchotte said. That was the trouble with her.
And Polly had nothing to be sad about: the beach was lovely. If Polly had lived through the war, she wouldnât keep asking to speak to her mother, as if you could just use the telephone whenever you felt like it, for no particular reason. The telephone was for grown-ups, it wasnât a toy. If Polly had known the war, she would hush.
* * *
Polly had drunk the war in with her motherâs milk; she loved stories about the Germans. At home, in North Carolina, her mother had a box of shadowy, scallop-edged photographs. The pictures were taken in a garden, and the people in the photographs sat at a round table beneath an apple tree, their faces tilted toward the shade. Pollyâs mother would pull the photographs out one by one and hold them in her palm. This is your tante Françoise, and this is your grandmother; this is your step-grandfather and this is your tante Yvonne. It is not real coffee they drinkâwe have no coffee, only chicoryâand there is no sugar to make a canard. The people in the photographs had been bombed a little later in the summer, buried beneath the rubble of the house, but you couldnât see the house in any of the photographs, and when Polly was olderâseven, eightâshe would wonder why the family hadnât stayed safely in the garden. But now, she questioned nothing except the horizon.
The box of photographs was kept in a trunk, and next to the box, nestled in bits of old flannel, was a thin, rusted helmet with a ragged hole in its side. No one is knowing I have Louisâs helmet, Pollyâs mother said one day, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, her back against the trunk. She was holding Polly in the V of her legs. You donât tell. Here, she said. You hold the helmet. Not the photographs, only the helmet. The helmet is strong. She pulled Polly up onto her lap and laughed the way she did when she was sad. Not enough strong, but even so, strong. Louis had been her older brother. She put her hand on Pollyâs forehead and stroked Pollyâs hair; then she ran her fingernails lightly along the inside of Pollyâs arm until Polly shivered and laughed and buried her face in her motherâs long, smooth neck.
She was not like other French mothers. She told Polly secrets, let her do whatever she wanted.
* * *
Polly stood at the edge of the ocean, her toes in the water. Yellow foam swirled up around her ankles and the cold sand pulled out from beneath her feet. Before her, small waves broke against the shore, turning white and frothy for a moment before collapsing; except for the glide and call of the seagulls, the sky was empty. Her mother would have let her stay there forever if Polly wanted, listening to the birds and staring out over the glare of the ocean at what was so clearly land, home. It was night in AmericaâPolly believed that, though the horizon was clear and lightâand she thought of the windows open and the sound of the whip-poor-wills.
Farther up the beach, beyond the seaweed and the driftwood, near the barnacle-covered rocks, where families lounged with umbrellas and towels and straw baskets, the other cousins were filling pails with sand, collecting shells, submitting willingly to an endless loop of scolding. There were six cousins altogether and, except for Polly, their names all went round and round: Jean, Jean-Marie, Marie-Jeanne, Jacques, and Jacqueline. All of them had dark, curly hair and deep suntans and they sang songs Polly didnât know. Even the twins, Jacques and Jacqueline, who were four, knew the songs, and only cried if they fell down. Their mother was Tante Françoise, but the othersâthe Jean Mariesâwere second cousins. They spent all their holidays, even Christmas and Easter, away from their mother. The Jean Maries adored Tante Chouchotte, and the lemon and orange taffy she kept in her pocket, which she doled out grudgingly, as if the children would not stop pestering her for it, though they never had.
Polly kept her gaze fixed on the horizon. If she looked at the others, and they looked back at her, she might burst into tears, and Tante Chouchotte or Tante Françoise would be mad. She would not be able to see America, how it shimmered in the distance.
* * *
Bonjour, Polly! Ătes-vous Americaine? her friends would howl, later, when, as a teenager, she told them how much sheâd hated her summers on the coast of Brittanyâthe sagging woolen bathing suits and the squat toilets, the casual swatting of thighs and bottoms, the snake-bite precision of a face slapâhow she had missed America, with its broad, white, gleaming sidewalks where a child could play whatever she wanted till the sun went down. Sheâd loved America when she was little, in the 1960s, with everything so new and shiny, all the pretty shopping centers and swimming pools and televisions.
A lifetime later, her friends, stoned out of their minds in the weedy, abandoned parking lot of one of those early shopping centers, could not stop laughing: Parlez-vous Français? Mais oui! OĂč est la Tour Eiffel? they cried. Ici!
She rolled her eyes, but if a handsome boy was in the group, or a popular girl, sheâd explain that she was a French citizen. She was known for her skill in lying to adults, so that a handsome or popular newcomer might think she was making it upâsheâd sat in the back all through French I and French II, never once raising her handâbut her other friends, the ones who knew her, vouched for her: She knows all that conjugation shit backward and forward.
In fact, she was a dual citizen, which did not suggest quite the same level of chicâof fashion sense and sexual capabilityâthat being purely French would have, but it wasnât a lie, either: she was French, and it pleased her to be two things at once, to contain two worlds, which she could move between freely, secretly; it was a kind of currency, earned during all those long, sad summers with Tante Chouchotte.
* * *
Now she stood perfectly still and quiet, but it was not enough to stay still and quiet. She must play with the other children. Viens jouer avec les autres! Come! A pail was thrust into her hand and a wave of pure grief rose in her chestâshe thought of the silky hair at the base of her motherâs neck, how her mother would let Polly twirl it around her fingerâbut she kept her eyes open, unblinking.
The grown-ups sighed when she mentioned her mother, they made low, guttural sounds of disapproval, or raised their voices, but they did not slap her as quickly as they would have slapped one of the others. Nine months a year in the States, an American father, a careless mother: Polly had no table manners, she couldnât pronounce her Râs, she said le maison and la chat.
Quâest-ce-que tâas enfin? Whatâs wrong with you?
Polly was silent. There was no answer that could satisfy. She tried to think of one, but her throat was too full, the sky too bright and empty.
Pourquoi tâes toujours si triste? Why, Polly? Why are you always sad?
She thought of the war and imagined a chair beneath a bare bulb, the adults all leaning in over her: Pourquoi? Mais pourquoi?
Is that possible? At five? To imagine herself being interrogated that way? They were better than Mother Goose, all those old, romantic stories. Adventures of bombs and rubble and danger. The prisoner tied to his chair. If you had known the war, you would hush! Oh, if you had known. If only you had known! She wanted to know.
Why, Polly?
She knelt down where she was, and began scooping the hard, foamy sand into her pail.
Not here, Polly! Come join the others! Whatâs wrong with you?
As if a person could ever answer that question. To answer incorrectly is as dangerous as not answering, unless you can come up with a diversion. Her mother had explained it all to her: how bravely people lied when the Nazis were at the door, when they themselves faced torture. Torture, Polly. The Germans put the gun to their face but they never tell what they know. If the Nazis ask where is somebody, they invent a story. They make a diversion. Pollyâs mother spoke English, because Pollyâs father didnât like listening to French. But he didnât mind when she took the children to France for the summer. He couldnât practice with the kids making a racket all the time. His practice room was in a separate little house in the backyard, but still the childrenâs noises made him want to buy a firearm. Oh, Peter. Pollyâs mother wou...
